Ode to Reason

This week's Camino a Ítaca asks if such a thing exists as fascist children's literature. A few trolls came out their lairs and found me on this piece. Their comments are hallucinatory, if a bit frightening. Click over to read the originally published piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Do fascists read? And if they do, do they read things like poetry? They more than likely reread speeches by Hitler, Mussolini and our local Gallego contingent but do they venture much further? We all know they have a particular penchant for banning books and even organizing barbeques over them on special occasions. Worse yet, they even have an unfortunate history of murdering those who write them and dumping them in mass graves. But do they actually read them?

We know that they certainly don’t like many poets. Just after the civil war ended a fascist triumphant wrote about some of Spain’s greatest poets in the ABC, “Alberti, Cernuda, Miguel Hernández, Altolaguirre, en el verso, son los tristes Homeros de una Ilíada de derrotas. Porque sólo fulge el soneto como un diamante cuando lo talla una espada victoriosa...son unos poemas de laboratorio, sin fuerza ni hermosura, equívocos, cobardes y llorones.”

("Alberti, Cernuda, Miguel Hernández, Altolaguirre, in verse, are the sad Homers of an Iliad of defeats. Because the sonnet only shines like a diamond when it is cut by a victorious sword...they are laboratory poems, without strength or beauty, equivocal, cowardly and weeping.")

So if they do read, the question is what do they read? What kind of stories do they read to their children? Are their children’s books about typical things like sharing, helping others and learning to work within a community or are they more about feeding the weakest members of society to the wicked witch and then selling their repossessed homes to international vulture investment funds?

They do tout their Christianity often, so perhaps the bible is high up on their reading list. But if you look closely at their rhetoric, it has a much more Old Testament vibe to it, more about supporting genocides and persecuting the ‘other’, than the Sermon on the Mount.

So how do they express themselves culturally?

We know that they have a particular penchant for jingoistic, Wagnerian marches, awkwardly goosestepping through squares, forming pogroms, organizing masses in front of Ferraz and villainizing MENAs, but other than that, what are their cultural representations beyond nazi salutes and mass executions?

In Caceres it seems that they have a thing against the renowned poet and children’s literature writer, Gloria Fuertes. Gone are the days of lining writers they don’t like against walls, shooting them and dumping them in unmarked graves, so now they have resorted to different measures.

The far right have taken orders from Madrid and decided to make things uncomfortable for the PP beyond the regional level and have moved their battle to the town halls where they have influence. In Caceres they have presented a motion to change the name of a central children’s playground from Gloria Fuertes to a curious substitute.

Rather than choosing Primode Rivera or any other of the leaders from their fascist pantheon, they have proposed naming if after the princess Leanor, the granddaughter of the man who ultimately betrayed them and went against the caudillo’s wishes and transitioned Spain from being a fascist theocracy to a modern European constitutional monarchy.

In doing so they once again prove that they have absolutely no recipes for bettering the lives of the citizens of the country they claim to love so dearly. All the while wasting the time and energy of the government on matters that might resound with a small portion of their electorate but in the end matter nothing to the general public.

The Tyranny of the Tale

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at how narrative and storytelling can influence the way people think and even make them overlook facts. Click over to read the originally published piece in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

If you heard the phrase ‘Having been said and said and said’ or ‘Beyond seven mountains, beyond seven forests’ or ‘Once in the old days when tigers smoked’ it probably wouldn’t mean anything to you. In fact, the phrase itself might not even make sense.

But if you change these set phrases slightly to ‘once upon a time’, suddenly an entire world blossoms. Our minds open up and instantly get ready for a cortisol (encouraging attentiveness) and oxytocin (encouraging connection) boost. Upon hearing those words, our instinctual pattern-seeking minds make themselves ready for a tale.

Story lulls. It pushes us into the realm of imagination and it encourages the listener to overlook and even ignore facts. Details are sometimes amplified and at times muted or erased and apparent irrelevancies can be integrated or thinned.

As the writer Yuval Noah Harari has described it, “Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings.” In essence we are persuaded more by story than by statistics; we recall facts, even if they are dubious, longer and are more apt to believe them if they are embedded in narrative.

The far right have come to understand this human trait and now weave grotesque fictional tales across the global political landscape. Truth no longer matters and political messages are now couched in fables, complete with good and bad guys and epic battles between biblical good and evil.

Faced with policy failure or even a complete lack of policy in most cases, the far right have adopted George Bush Jr’s political strategist’s infamous approach. Karl Rove called it the Sheherazade strategy. A chimera that goes like this. When you have nothing to say, and nothing to lose, start telling stories.

But not just any story.

They create stories so fabulous, so spellbinding and yet so untrue, that Sheherazade’s sheik, or in our case, the voting public forgets all about the actual truth and sink into the tale.

With stories, there is no longer any need to bother with the truth. A look back to the recent debate between Trump and a tired Biden highlights this. Trump has long been a used snake oil salesman, a shyster and a con artist, but during the debate he didn’t even pretend to bother with the truth. Fact checkers have shown that he told a lie every ninety seconds during the debate. And as these lies were camouflaged in story, his followers believe.

It's a strategy that has been adopted by the far right here in Spain and has led to their success in entering regional governments like here in Extremadura and which may even lead to a democratically elected Vichy 2.0 government in France tomorrow.

It is pointless for democrats to fight fake facts, or true but cynically twisted facts, with other facts. The new stories we need to tell are not just the corrections of fake stories, they need to be new visions. Visions that create hope rather than the distortions and lies on sale from the ultra right.